The Supreme Court last week defended the rights of American minors to maim and murder, rob the elderly . . . and assassinate President Kennedy.

Well, the right to do all that while playing violent video games, anyway.

A 7-2 split court, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion, overturned a California law banning the sale of ultraviolent video games to minors on the grounds that it violated First Amendment protections of free speech.

“Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and . . . ‘they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature,’ ” Scalia wrote, also quoting a prior decision.

Scalia held that the government has no place in regulating depictions of violence, which kids regularly encounter in fairy tales and televised cartoons.

And high-school reading from “The Odyssey” down to “Lord of the Flies” has long depicted astounding violence — all while free of government intervention.

“No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed,” Scalia wrote.

The decision was the capstone of two Supreme Court terms that have expanded free-speech rights, including:

* The Citizens United decision (2010), which allowed corporations and unions to make campaign contributions as a protected form of political speech.

* A related case Monday, in which the court struck down an Arizona campaign-finance law that hemmed in speech.

* And overturning a law banning the sale of videos that depicted cruelty to animals, and separately defending the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to hold profane and offensive protests at veterans’ funerals.